James Cameron Disagrees with ‘Mythbusters,’ Defends the ‘Titanic’ Ending

It’s a debate as old as time. Or at least as old as James Cameron’s Titanic, which came out in 1997, so not that old, but still. “They both could have fit on that door!” is the rallying cry of Titanic truthers, who believe that the door (which isn’t actually a door (it’s ajar! just kidding)) that Rose (Kate Winslet) floats on while Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) freezes to death in the subzero waters of the North Atlantic was big enough to hold both of them. Mythbusters even dedicated an episode to it. But Cameron himself is still holding fast to the movie’s original ending, much like Jack’s hands after they froze.

During a recent conversation with The Daily Beast, the problem was inevitably brought up. After all this time, had Cameron finally changed his mind and admitted defeat? No.

[Laughs] We’re gonna go there? Look, it’s very, very simple: you read page 147 of the script and it says, “Jack gets off the board and gives his place to her so that she can survive.” It’s that simple. You can do all the post-analysis you want. So you’re talking about the Mythbusters episode, right? Where they sort of pop the myth? OK, so let’s really play that out: you’re Jack, you’re in water that’s 28 degrees, your brain is starting to get hypothermia. Mythbusters asks you to now go take off your life vest, take hers off, swim underneath this thing, attach it in some way that it won’t just wash out two minutes later—which means you’re underwater tying this thing on in 28-degree water, and that’s going to take you five to ten minutes, so by the time you come back up you’re already dead. So that wouldn’t work. His best choice was to keep his upper body out of the water and hope to get pulled out by a boat or something before he died. They’re fun guys and I loved doing that show with them, but they’re full of s---.

He does bring up a good point: a solution that took a bunch of guys an entire television episode to come up with probably wouldn’t be that feasible while your brain is gradually turning off the blood flow to your extremities. But will this stop people wishing for a happier ending? Probably not.